


PLACES/MINDS

by dejavu (suggcest)



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Camping, Canon Compliant, Dream Violence, Dreams and Nightmares, First Kiss, M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Minor Injuries, Sharing A Tent, shyanexchange2k18, shyanwritingevents, some creepy vibes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-14
Updated: 2018-07-14
Packaged: 2019-06-10 04:21:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15283524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suggcest/pseuds/dejavu
Summary: Ryan has gone through this before.Sure, usually when he dreams about Shane dying on a shoot, it actually involves the supernatural in some way—aliens beaming down and vaporizing him, hands reaching from the wall and snapping his neck, a giant snake emerging from a drain pipe in a haunted location to swallow him whole. But he's seen this too: Shane falling in front of his eyes, there one minute, gone the next.Usually he would wake up as twisted in his sheets as his lungs felt in his chest, staring up at the morning light dripping off the stucco ceiling until he was fully back in his skin. He’d ask himself why the fuck this happens in his head, why Shane, over and over again. And then when no answers came, he’d remind himself that he was home in L.A., and that if something was going to kill Shane on location, it would have happened by now.This time, there’s no blinking back to the safety of his room.(Or; Ryan and Shane go camping in a canyon after a shoot. Shane falls off a cliff and into Ryan's head)





	PLACES/MINDS

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bonestilts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bonestilts/gifts).



> sup im back
> 
> so first off, apologies to my giftee, who gave me the simplest prompt ever just being like "honestly I just want them to go camping after some ghoul hunting" (not an exact quote) and my dramatic ass self was like "did I hear angst??? recurring dream references??? physical injuries??? protective Ryan??? cliffs??? ANGST??????"
> 
> I mean, there is a tent so,
> 
> also, peep me making a quick reference to your second prompt of body swap in this fic ehhhh (one of my prompts for my person was body swap! great minds think alike! but camping was ur first choice, so, went with that)
> 
> DISCLAIMER: never been to the Grand Canyon. seen enough pictures of the Grand Canyon to know there's definitely NOWHERE near the level of foliage there as described in the fic (in fact, in most places there appears to be None! it's a canyon!), but fuck u I do what I want. if you live next to the Grand Canyon and it's bugging u, uhhhhh this is an alternate universe where everything is the same but the Grand Canyon has more trees and like...places of water. could I have just set this somewhere else? yes. but that hotel at the Grand Canyon is genuinely apparently haunted and I love the idea of them doing a Grand Canyon episode, so I want to put that energy out into the world. 
> 
> fun fact, I read the rules wrong and wrote this whole thing in July thinking I could post as early as then, r.i.p. me
> 
> this is allllll fictional. just want to remind everyone that if you send a link of this fic--or quote this fic, or tweet about this fic, or mention the existence of this fic--to the boys or anyone affiliated with them irl, I will know it was u and I'll track u down and peel ur skin off
> 
> if you are an employee at buzzfeed, or a family member/friend of one of the ghoulboys and somehow found this fic, I would love to point out the x in the corner of the window and instruct you to click it. you don't want to read a sappy story about people you know are platonic friends irl being in mad love with each other. it's weird. I know it's weird. I'm trying to protect you from my weird. work with me here. 
> 
> (I will be locking this to the archive as soon as authors are revealed, so if you don't have an account and want to save this before then, make sure to download it while it's anonymous!)
> 
> to everyone else and especially my giftee, enjoy I guess, sorry for the weird tenses stuff. I had fun writing it despite my deep love of grouchy author notes!

Ryan has gone through this before.

Sure, usually when he dreams about Shane dying on a shoot, it actually involves the supernatural in some way—aliens beaming down and vaporizing him, hands reaching from the wall and snapping his neck, a giant snake emerging from a drain pipe in a haunted location to swallow him whole. But he's seen this too: Shane falling in front of his eyes, there one minute, gone the next.

Usually he would wake up as twisted in his sheets as his lungs felt in his chest, staring up at the morning light dripping off the stucco ceiling until he was fully back in his skin. He’d ask himself why the fuck this happens in his head, why Shane, over and over again. And then when no answers came, he’d remind himself that he was home in L.A., and that if something was going to kill Shane on location, it would have happened by now.

This time, there’s no blinking back to the safety of his room. Shane’s looking over his shoulder at Ryan behind him, a smile caught at the corner of his mouth, and then, with a shattering slide of gravel, he’s toppling forward out of sight before Ryan can do a damn thing, smile hanging in the empty air where he’d been like a cartoon.

Suddenly, the reason behind the dreams is clear.

****

Twenty-four hours earlier, Shane had been a shadow walking up the steps of the El Tovar Hotel for their investigation. It didn’t look particularly haunted, but the view it had of the Grand Canyon, looking like a jagged scar in the earth under the cloudy sky, was more than enough to add atmosphere. They shot their intro outside on the patio instead of inside the building just so Mark could catch the edge of the canyon in the distance in the lens of the camera. When Shane leaned back against the railing and nodded along with the ghost story, his elbow pressed into Ryan’s, bony and comforting. 

They didn’t see the black caped figure at the hotel’s front steps, or at the grave site it was meant to frequent, and they didn’t run into the spectre of Fred Harvey, who opened the hotel in 1905. The spirit box screeched nothing but nonsense words, and when they stayed overnight in a room where a guest had reported feeling ghosts pull at her clothing in her sleep, Ryan woke up after a full, dreamless night’s sleep to see Shane still peacefully passed out in the other bed, hair tangled up at the top of his head and his mouth gone slack.

“Maybe you’ll hear some stuff when you go through the audio later,” Shane offered. He was a drooping, marionette man in mornings, pulling on his socks like he was still half asleep. The metaphor felt wrong—these days, Ryan feels like he’s the one getting his strings pulled on their shoots, spitting out rote answers to Shane’s attempts at different bits.

“Maybe,” he said, but for once, he didn’t really believe it. This hotel didn’t make him scared the way other places have.

Mark was flying home early with most of the camera equipment, because he was needed on a shoot for another show, but Shane and Ryan were given the okay to stay a couple days longer. There’s a spot in the canyon itself where two airplanes crashed, and even if Shane and Ryan weren’t good enough at hiking to reach it, they had the permit to try.

It’s not meant to be a focus of the episode—can’t be when they’ve just got their GoPros and handheld cameras to film with, and more hours of hiking to do than they’re willing to film, but when Ryan had said they were going here, Shane said that they couldn’t not go in the canyon itself.

“After all, you’ve got the boots for it now,” he said. “Boot bros, baby!”

Ryan aimed his camera down at their feet as they first made their way down into the canyon, the morning after the hotel investigation, catching the matching flash of beige fabric slipping through the underbrush. Shane insisted on marching ahead of Ryan, on “blazing the trail.

“My family used to take me on these big camping trips in the summer,” he said. “We’d always go on hikes and stuff, and I’d lead the way because I wasn’t afraid of encountering cobwebs.”

“Dude, I’m not afraid of spiders,” Ryan said.

“You say that now, but wait until one as big as your fist comes leaping out at you.”

“Where do you think we are, Australia?”

Once inside the forest and moving down the slow slope of the canyon, they couldn’t really see the magnitude of the structure they were trying to hike across—they had to reach the bottom of the canyon and cross the river at a certain point before they would be moving up the more dramatic, rocky side of the canyon. Ryan caught glimpses of it through the thin trees—the bright face of the other side, lit up by the sun and so impossibly far away from him that the lines of the rock trails winding up looked like scribbles on brick. He couldn’t quite fathom how distant it was, how much they would have to cross to meet it.

Shane was wearing a shirt that was almost the same colour as the stone walls, and sometimes, when a shaft of light filtered down out of the shadow of the canyon and onto the back of Shane’s neck, Ryan mistook the line of his shoulders for those distant rocks. Equally out of reach.

****

Shane brought a tent in his pack, one of those tiny, two-man things that Ryan knew wouldn’t be able to fit both of them comfortably. He’s been on enough beds with Shane to have a sense of how much space they need together—just another piece of knowledge he never meant to have. 

“I still don’t think we should stop for the night,” he said as they moved farther down the slope. “We should just go as far as we can and then head back while we still have light.”

“Our flight back isn’t until the day after tomorrow,” Shane said, not even looking over his shoulder. “Why not sleep out here for one night? I thought you’d want to experience a night in a possibly haunted canyon—good extra footage, right?”

Ryan shoved his camera back in its case. “We’ve got enough footage though.”

“Do we?”

They probably didn’t. But at home, when they were booking plane tickets and talking about hiking through the canyon itself, Ryan had envisioned this as a break in shooting. He knew it was out of character for him to not want to go deeper into a potentially haunted location, but he’s been feeling out of character lately, like he’s standing just to the left of himself every time he tries to do anything that used to be normal.

Maybe he’s hoping for once that this canyon isn’t haunted. He’s tired of collecting backdrops for his dreams, especially when it’s a place as cool as this.

“Come on, Ryan, it’ll be fun,” Shane said, pulling the last word up into a bubbly, dumb voice—Gene’s voice.

There’s nothing Ryan hates more than the fact that he can tell the difference between Shane’s stupid fast food voices, except possibly the equally stupid smile he could feel shouldering its way onto his face.

I don’t want to feel like this, he thought suddenly, the feeling passing over him like a shadow. He was tired.

“Not if it’s with you, Sasquatch,” he said. It came out too deadened to sound like a joke, but Shane laughed anyway.

****

Ryan looks back on those words in a couple hours, when Shane’s passed out in his arms, and adds them to the list of things he regrets saying to Shane. It’s a long list.

The list of things he regrets never saying to Shane is longer.

****

Way before they’d gotten near the bottom of the canyon, they hit a river.

It was more of a creek, really, probably only six feet across and four feet deep, shallow enough that they could see the shiny stones at the bottom of it glimmering up at them. The current was slow, almost still, but Ryan would bet anything that somewhere up ahead, where it wound out of sight, the ground ceased its plateau and the creek turned into a little waterfall.

He was pulling off his shirt before he could think too hard about it. If the air was a relief on his chest where it had gone sticky with heat, the water was going to be even better.

They left their things piled on the bank and plunged into the river in their underwear. Shane was wearing this stupid looking baggy white pair that billowed up around the top of his thighs like inflatable arm bands as he waded in. When Ryan made fun of him, Shane tried to kick him and almost fell, windmilling frantically. Ryan laughed until his face felt glowing hot—he was almost surprised when he dipped it in the water and no steam came curling up around him.

It did cross his mind to film this. One camera on the bank, pointed towards them. They wouldn’t even have to pay any attention to it. But he’d walked into the water simply because he wanted to, and Shane had followed him because he wanted to. A camera would change the reason why that happened.

“I thought the only water out here was the Colorado River,” Shane said. “We did go into the right canyon, didn’t we?”

Ryan made a show of looking around himself. “Oh my god, Shane, you’re right. We’ve accidentally ended up in a completely different place.”

“Do we get naming rights if we’ve discovered this new canyon?”

“Makes sense.”

“What about ‘The Madej’? Has a nice ring, doesn’t it?”

“Oh, and I don’t get a part in this?”

“We could,” and Shane was laughing too hard to get it out at first, his eyes perfect half moon squints above his cheeks, “we could call it our like, name-smush. The ship name thing.”

“The what?”

“Shyan!” Shane said, stabbing a finger at him. “Shyan Canyon, home of lovers and cryptids.”

“So you’re admitting you’re a cryptid,” Ryan said, trying to ignore the crawling feeling on his skin. “Always knew there was a reason you were so horny for Bigfoot.”

“Did I say I was referring to myself?”

“Well, either way, I’m not sharing a name with you,” Ryan says. “I want proper credit in this discovery. I know what you’re trying to do here.”

Shane dropped his chin to his chest, still grinning loosely. He passed a hand just over the surface of the water, like a hover-ship skimming the waves.

“Do you?”

Ryan dove underwater, letting the wash of cold swallow up his entire body. It was so shallow that the effort to keep himself from bumping up against the surface drove him right down to the bottom, where rows of smooth stones pressed themselves into the skin of his stomach like the flats of teeth. He came back up gasping.

“Maybe there was a lot of rain the week before we got here,” he said after a moment.

“Enough to just create new rivers?”

“This must flow down into the Colorado,” Ryan says, looking up at the canopy of leaves above him. “There’s a lot more trees here than it looks like there is elsewhere in the canyon—maybe it just protects it from evaporating. I don’t know."

“Sure.”

When Ryan glanced over, Shane wasn’t looking at him. He was facing towards the path that they had come from, his eyes turned completely out of view except for the wispy edge of eyelashes sticking out over his right cheekbone. His body was still tilted more or less in Ryan’s direction though, neck and shoulders twisted so that droplets of water had no choice but to follow the stretch of his skin in a meandering path south, like a river trying to make its way down a canyon.

A drop sitting at the base of Shane’s neck was suddenly set free when he swallowed, and Ryan watched it race across his topography. Past the span of his shoulders, rounded with pale brown freckles, down over his pecs and his slowly expanding ribs, to the soft part of his stomach just above the line of the water.

Shane was big enough to be a geographical landscape. Alternatively bright and shadowed under the summer sun though the trees, he breathed out and Ryan looked at the strip of skin above Shane’s underwear, dyed an even paler colour through the surface of the water, and thought about pressing his thumb into that softness to feel the intake of breath.

“We should keep going,” he said. For some reason, he couldn’t breathe now.

****

Maybe it’s the swim that did it, that lead them to the edge. Maybe it made them looser on their feet as they moved forward, out of the tree cover and into the sparser greenery clinging to the rocks. Maybe it made Ryan too distracted to look properly at where they were going. Maybe if Shane had put his shirt back on, Ryan would’ve insisted on taking a turn walking out in front, instead of willingly hanging back and trying to make a map out of the shape of Shane’s spine under his skin.

Whatever it is, the fact remains that Ryan’s not thinking about the dreams or filming or his inexplicably shitty mood by the time it happens.

Shane falls anyway.

****

Here’s how it happened, as best as Ryan can piece it together after:

Shane looked over his shoulder to toss a stupid joke Ryan’s way—he’d noticed Ryan’s mood lifting, or complicating at least, and he’d been encouraging it with banter for half a mile—and he stepped over a bush.

His foot landed slightly right of the actual trail, because he wasn’t looking where he was placing his feet. There’s no ground there behind the bush, just a short, ten foot drop off.

Shane made a small noise, like the air suddenly rushing out of a balloon, and vanished from sight.

Ten feet later, he came to a halt, feet first, against an outcropping of rock. Scrapes all down the back of his legs, his right side, and his right palm where he tried to catch himself on the rock.

Right ankle turned sideways under his body with a yell of pain.

Every monument of geography has its weak points.

****

Ryan makes his way down to Shane as fast as he can, climbing down from the trail to where Shane is holding his foot, white-faced. Ryan keeps saying, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” interspersed with Shane’s name, like they’re one and the same.

“Are you okay?”

“Not sure.”

Leaning on Ryan, Shane tries to stand, which goes pretty well until he puts his right foot down. He hisses in and presses the side of his head firm into Ryan’s skull, shockingly close. There is moisture at the corners of his eyes, and Ryan doesn’t know if it’s tears or sweat.

“I think it’s sprained,” Shane says. “Fuck, I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry? It’s not like you did this on purpose,” Ryan says. He wraps his arm more securely around Shane’s waist, holding him firm. “Unless you did, I mean, that would be a pretty stupid way to force me to carry all the gear.”

Shane laughs, but his face is so screwed up that even that looks like it’s causing him pain. He’s closed his eyes.

“Hey, hey,” Ryan says, shaking him a little. “Look, though, you found the best view.”

And he did: it’s the first time they’ve been able to see properly across the whole canyon, and it looks even more massive from inside than it did when they were standing on the top at the hotel. With the sun starting to sink towards the horizon, the shadows from their side are stretching so wide and long across the scraped out landscape that it looks like a closing mouth, like everything within the canyon is going to be eaten whole by nightfall. Far below, the Colorado River is a deep purple ribbon, winding into the distance both ways.

“Worth an ankle, right?” Ryan says.

“Not really,” Shane says, and he sounds so tired suddenly that Ryan can’t joke anymore.

He apologizes. Shane apologizes to him. They try to walk up the slope to where Ryan left all their gear on his mad dash down to Shane, but with Shane hopping on one foot and leaning all of his weight on Ryan, it takes them a solid ten minutes, and Shane is sweating so heavily by the time they collapse next to the camera bag that his skin is glued to Ryan’s. Separating feels like he’s losing part of himself.

“Fuck,” Shane says.

Ryan’s hands are too empty—he’s starting to shake ever so slightly, like he’s cold. But it’s still so fucking hot. He digs out one of their GoPros and turns it on, aiming it at Shane.

“So, buddy,” he says, fake-jovially. “Tell us what just happened.”

Shane glances at the camera and gives Ryan the finger, not even trying to keep it off-screen.

“Well, I just tripped while out here searching for ghosts,” he says. He doesn’t sound like he has to fake a calm, but Ryan knows him better than that. “And I’ve twisted my ankle just a little bit. So, there it is, what you’ve all been waiting for: an injury on a shoot.”

“Ghosts, 1. Shane, zero.”

“A ghost did not shove me down that incline, Bergara, I did that all by myself,” Shane says. “Don’t you dare take my own stupidity from me.”

“Oh, I’d never want to do that.”

“Also, by that logic, every time we haven’t gotten injured on a shoot is a point to me, so it’s like, ghosts, 1, Shane, 85, or something.”

“So you’re saying a ghost did shove you off that cliff? Interesting how your story keeps changing.”

Shane pushes the camera away from him, but he is starting to smile slightly, so Ryan doesn’t turn it off yet. He probably should, but he needs proof that Shane is listening to him.

“What are we going to do now, Shane?”

“Set up camp, call the ghoul-copter to come airlift us out of here?”

“No,” says Ryan. “We’re going to head back while we’ve still got light, like I said we should earlier.”

Shane hangs his head down between his knees, lacing his fingers behind his neck.

“Fine,” he said, his voice distant. “Shane, zero, Ryan, one.”

Through the square of the viewfinder, he looks greyer than before. Ryan pans down to focus in on his ankle, swollen and red above his sandals. As he’s zooming in, Shane slumps suddenly towards him, his knees pressing into Ryan’s legs and his torso mashing up against Ryan’s side.

“Dude, get off,” Ryan says. He turns the camera up towards Shane’s face, still looking down at it instead of his friend. Shane’s closed eyes swim into focus on the screen.

Ryan puts down the camera.

“Shane?”

He doesn’t answer.

****

Ryan holds Shane for a long moment, picturing his ceiling in L.A., wondering if this really is a nightmare he can wake up from. But when he closes his eyes and opens them, and yet Shane is still there, warm in his arms and not opening his own eyes, Ryan knows there’s no escape as easy as that.

He shakes Shane until Shane jolts awake again and lurches away from him, confused, and then Ryan forces him to drink some water. He can’t remember when he last saw Shane sip from his water bottle, and he doesn’t know if it’s the pain or dehydration, but one thing he is certain about:

“We’re leaving now.”

“What, you don’t want to milk my pain for our viewers any longer?” Shane huffs. He looks almost drunk.

“Oh, I always want to do that.”

Deja vu—everything Ryan does and says sounds the same. He’s gone through this before.

****

When they originally started their hike, Shane carried the tent, the sleeping bags, and a camera bag. Ryan carried the other cameras and a bag packed with food, emergency supplies, and extra water. As they start to head back, Ryan takes all the bags except for one sleeping bag roll that Shane refuses to part with, swearing he has to “do his part”. Ryan’s hoping it’ll take enough weight off of Shane that he’ll be able to hobble home, and he takes the lead this time so he can make sure there’s nothing more on the trail that Shane will slip on.

Half an hour later, Shane calls for him to stop in a weak little voice, and when Ryan looks behind him, Shane is propped up against a tree so thin it’s bending under his weight. Behind him, the slope of the trail is evident, sliding away into the blue, shadowed maw of the canyon, and Ryan rushes to put his shoulder under Shane’s arm before he can topple backwards and disappear on him again.

“Give me the sleeping bag,” he says.

“We could share it,” Shane says nonsensically. He grins at Ryan, a lazy, hazy thing, and god, are his eyes unfocusing or is Ryan just panicking?

“Give me it.”

Shane drops the sleeping bag on the ground. Ryan’s not sure he meant to, but he picks it up anyway. Looks at it, puts it back down, and slowly wriggles his own arms out of all of their gear, still carefully keeping Shane upright. He slides the sleeping bags onto each arm, backwards so that they hang in front of his chest, and hangs the camera bags around his neck. They’re light enough not to pull too bad.

“You’re going to have to carry the tent again,” he says. “And the extra bag.”

“Man, and I thought fucking up your ankle was supposed to come with perks,” Shane says. “I did not take this into account when I purposefully threw myself off that cliff.”

“Shut up,” Ryan says.

“Ryan Bergara, making an invalid carry the heaviest things,” Shane continues as Ryan slides the tent bag and the food bag up his arms onto his back. “Very uncharitable.”

“That’s not what invalid means.”

Ryan steps back, and Shane sways, slapping a hand against the tree again when his injured foot brushes against the ground. His face twists, his stomach sucking in sharply concave under his ribs.

“I definitely feel in-valid right now,” he says thickly. “Get it? Not valid, like the kids say.”

“Very funny.”

“Ry,” Shane breathes, and it’s so thin that it sends a shiver racing through Ryan, like the distant sound of a potential ghost on location. “Not to be selfish, but I actually, seriously don’t think I can carry these.”

Ryan’s seen Shane tired before. Working at Buzzfeed, you get run off of your feet almost everyday. He knows what Shane looks like when he’s at the end of his rope with frustration, or exhaustion, or just boredom. Shane tends to shut down, all of his light retreating into him like he’s closed a door. Ryan’s learned how to knock just right to get him to open back up, and he’s learned when not to knock at all.

But right now, they’re on new ground, because Shane isn’t locked down behind a mask. He’s got his face turned into his arm, and he’s not looking at Ryan, but he’s also not hiding a fucking thing, his face twisting and falling lax in between breaths; he’s openly in pain. Ryan feels a rush of tenderness he wishes he still didn’t understand, and shoves it to the back of his mind with all the force he can muster.

“I know,” Ryan says, and waits until Shane looks back up at him, those sad, droopy eyes gone sore and red at the sockets.

“But you have to,” he continues, “because otherwise, I can’t carry you.”

****

It’s both easier and harder once he’s got Shane draped over him. Easier because he knows where Shane is, and all he has to worry about is putting one foot in front of the other and making sure his hands stay wrapped around Shane’s thighs where they’re slung over his hips. Harder because even though they put their shorts back on once their underwear dried, both of their shirts are still off. The heat hasn’t let up, so he can feel Shane’s skin shifting tacky and hot against his own, can feel the differences in the pressure of his ribs versus his stomach where they rub against his back. It’s harder because he knows now how the texture of Shane’s nipples feels compared to the rest of his skin. Harder because Shane’s stupidly large head is hanging beside his own, and Ryan keeps hyper focusing in on the breath going in and out of his mouth, and having your whole world narrow in on making sure one person’s breathing remains steady is more of a burden than any physical weight.

But yeah, Shane’s also heavy as fuck, which Ryan tries not to think about, because thinking about it might mean he’s thinking about how much easier it would be to just lie down and let Shane’s body flatten him into the earth.Shane has too many arms and too many legs to be carried comfortably. There is simply too much of him, and that is a fact.

But Ryan’s strong, and he’s got something else on his side—the kind of desperate devotion that comes from watching someone die again and again in your sleep.

“Are you my Sam?” Shane asked him when Ryan first picked him up. “You can’t carry the ring, but you can carry me?”

He did a horrible, if somewhat winded version of Samwise Gamgee’s accent, and Ryan huffed out a laugh.

“Yes,” he said.

“You’d follow me to Mount Doom?”

“Sure.”

“You’d fight Gollum for me?”

“Maybe.”

“You’d come back no matter how much of a shit I was being?”

And that was a lot sappier and direct than Shane ever got, even considering how loopy the whole ankle situation had sent him. “Please tell me you don’t also have heat stroke, dude.”

Shane breathed out hot and damp against Ryan’s neck for a moment before answering, in a gruff, Gandalf voice. “Don’t you lose him, Samwise Gamgee.”

“Pick a character, you can’t be both.”

“That’s not how that bit goes.”

“Unlike you, I haven’t memorized those movies line by line.”

It’s been twenty minutes since then that they’ve been walking, maybe longer, and although Lord of the Rings wasn’t the last dumb thing Shane brought up, he’s been silent for a while. It feels like Shane is sinking down into Ryan, and he hitches him up more securely on his back every few minutes, moving carefully so he doesn’t knock Shane off of him completely. The sleeping bags at the front of his chest swing against each other as he moves forward, bumping with plush, muted noises.

It’s getting darker now that they’ve made it back into the trees, and Ryan can’t tell how much farther they’ve got to go. His arms and back are starting to burn and he’s sinking too, into a simpler state of mind where all that exists is the bubble of dark around him and the path.

They could be anywhere. They could have walked off the face of the earth and into some sort of metaphysical plane and Ryan wouldn’t know. This could still be all in his head.

It takes him a moment to realize he’s stopped walking. Shane is so heavy on his back, and he’s stopped trying to hold his head away from Ryan’s—his hair is pressed to Ryan’s cheek, the side of his face against his ear so that Ryan can’t hear anything on that side but the thick, underwater sound of Shane’s breathing.

It’s not a dream, he tells himself. You’re awake, and you’re getting him out of here safe. You’re both okay.

There’s a sound off to his left, and Ryan’s bubble of awareness explodes out all at once, racing out into the trees around them as he strains to hear. They’re nowhere near the plane crash, sure, but those may not have been the only people to die in this canyon and leave an imprint behind.

“Hey, Shane, you think you could hold a camera?” Ryan says quietly. “Just while I’m walking, in case anything tries to sneak up on us?”

Shane doesn’t say anything, and for a split second, Ryan imagines dream logic has taken hold and the human shaped lump on his back has been transformed into something else entirely—an alien, a sack of organs, a mass of gelatine that would dissolve in a choking wave over him if he held on too tight. He’s had weirder dreams.

Then Shane’s hand slips from Ryan’s shoulder to hang down in front of his chest, and Ryan closes his eyes, listening for that steady breathing. It’s still there, but deeper now. They are sunk in the darkest part of the forest yet, no sign of anything but trees, no canyon, no ghostly plane passengers, just navy and purple trees branches reaching out towards them.

“Buddy?”

Ryan jostles the shoulder Shane is lying on, and his head bounces limply. When Ryan accidentally straightens up a little more, Shane starts to slide, the full weight of his body pressing into Ryan’s hands.

“Shane!”

This time, at least, he catches Shane when he falls. Mostly.

****

Shane wakes up in the middle of Ryan wrapping his ankle, and his first instinct, apparently, is to kick out with the injured leg.

“Jesus, calm down!”

“Ah, fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Shane curls in on himself, his foot shaking in Ryan’s grasp. Ryan rubs at his jaw, where the edge of Shane’s nasty, huge foot had caught him.

“Next time, maybe I shouldn’t bother with taking care of you,” he mutters.

In the orange, flickering light, Shane’s bright eyes change shapes second to second. He sits up as carefully as he can, looking around, and Ryan ducks his head back over his shitty first aid job, letting Shane take in the clearing himself: two-man tent laid out flat in the corner, their bags piled up beside it, and a tiny fire burning in a circle of rocks Ryan had haphazardly gathered.

“Welcome to Camp Bergara,” Ryan says when the silence has gone on too long. “Turns out I can’t carry you if you’re dead weight, and it’s too dark to keep going, so you win.”

He decides not to mention his own weird almost panic attack. It’s not really relevant.

“Only had to break my bones to do it,” Shane says lightly. He sounds a lot better, like passing out for a second time had been good for him. “How long was I out?”

“Like ten minutes, max.”

“And you made a fire in that time?”

“Boy Scout, baby.”

He wasn’t one—he just happened to have a lighter in his pocket and the basic knowledge from movies that a fire in a forest needed to be small and have stones around it to keep it contained. If any of that was false, they were screwed.

“I thought if we were going to be here overnight, I might as well make this more comfortable,” Ryan says, gesturing to Shane’s ankle. He ties a quick knot in the fabric around it, and pats it gently.

“Is that your shirt?”

“We didn’t have any bandages, okay, and I figured band-aids wouldn’t exactly do the trick!”

Also, he’d used them all up on the scrapes down the back of Shane’s legs. They’d brought a shockingly small box considering the fact that they were hiking in a canyon. It's possible that they're both idiots. 

Something presses into his arm, and Ryan looks down to see Shane’s poking him gingerly with his foot.

“Thanks,” Shane says. Those glowing eyes disappear into squints on his face as he smiles, big and genuine, and Ryan swallows hard.

“Stop moving, idiot,” he says. “Doesn’t that hurt?”

“Yeah, a bit,” Shane says cheerfully.

Ryan throws their water and food bag at Shane and forces him to eat before he has some of his own. After digging through every single bag, he miraculously finds some Tylenol cramped in the bottom of the tent bag, of all places, and forces Shane to take some of that as well. He puts up the tent by himself while Shane films and heckles him, and then he helps Shane slide closer to the fire so they can pull out the sandwiches and the marshmallows and fold-up metal roasting poles Shane had brought when he was packing optimistically for more of a camping trip than Ryan had wanted.

Infuriatingly, Shane’s suddenly in a good mood, despite the fact that his ankle is clearly still hurting him—Ryan can tell it is by the way Shane’s forehead goes pinched every time he shifts slightly. He’s full of smiles and jokes nonetheless, and Ryan tries not to be pissed off, because surely, it’s not like he wants Shane to be sitting here miserable and worrying about his ankle, right? Of course he doesn’t.

But if he was a little less happy in the shallow firelight, with marshmallow stretching sticky between his fingers, at least then Ryan wouldn’t be alone in feeling so off.

At some point, after they’ve eaten the sandwiches and fallen into a semi-comfortable silence, marshmallow gluing their mouths shut, a low sound breaks through the night in the distant pit of the canyon. They both freeze, Shane craning over his shoulder to look in the direction of the sound. It comes again, joined by others in different pitches, like a ghostly creature choir.

“Ryan, it’s the calls of the dead,” Shane says, in that low, serious voice he uses whenever he’s trying to get Ryan to freak out.

“It’s coyotes,” Ryan says, not in the mood to play along. “Should we put out the fire?”

“I don’t think they’re going to run towards one dinky fire,” Shane says. “Other people get permits and camp around here during the night—I’m sure there’s some who are closer to the pack than we are. I mean, if I was a coyote, I wouldn’t want to waste my energy going after gamey meat on the side of the canyon if there’s plump, good stuff near me.”

“Gamey? Speak for yourself.”

“Oh, are you prime meat, is that what you’re saying?”

“Maybe, yeah.”

“A three course coyote meal.”

“Three course? Try four—five.”

“Five?”

“Yeah, they wouldn’t know what to do with all this.”

Ryan mock-flexes, remembering only when Shane’s eyes flick over his torso that he’s still shirtless. He drops his arms, the unease coming back when Shane doesn’t look away. The unreality of the whole situation settles around his shoulders again—would Shane actually ever watch him the way he is now, or is Ryan making it up?

Shane’s said something and Ryan’s missed it.

“Sorry?”

Across the fire, Shane looks almost inhuman, all of the golden highlights on his arms and legs making him skinnier than usual, some sort of scarecrow man folded down with stickiness around his mouth. But he doesn’t look like any of the monsters that crowd their way into Ryan’s head at any chance. He looks almost sad, nodding slightly, as if Ryan’s failure to answer whatever he asked has confirmed something for him.

“What,” Ryan says.

“I could ask you that,” Shane says. “Specifically, ‘what is up?’”

Ryan stares at him for a moment, non-plussed. His heart is going really fast for some reason.

“Do you mean, like, in general? Because I would think it’s pretty obvious.”

He gestures to the fire and the trees around them and Shane’s ankle, still wrapped up in Ryan’s orange t-shirt—orange, like a CAUTION sign. Or a “this road is closed” sign.

“No,” Shane says. He runs a hand through his hair, gone stringy and shiny with sweat. The coyotes howl again, and Ryan wonders if he’s imagining that they sound closer.

“I feel like you and I are usually on the same sort of,” Shane pauses, sketching a hand through the air vaguely, “wavelength, I guess.”

“Except for your obtuseness when it comes to the subject of the supernatural.”

Shane sighs. “Look, Ryan, me and ghouls are just never going to get along.”

“You don’t need to get along, you just need to accept that they’re there with you.”

“I would love to do that, if they were actually there.”

“See, what you are is a really bad houseguest,” Ryan says. “Imagine if someone invited themselves over to your house and then wouldn’t acknowledge that you were even in the room. You’re just standing there like, hey man, hand me the cheese dip, and they’re just staring into the distance and muttering, like ‘oh, was that the wind just now? Sure is windy in here’.”

He’s waiting for Shane to say something about how Ryan is doing the same thing, inviting himself over to this hypothetical ghost’s house without asking. He’s waiting for Shane to stretch the bit out like they always do, until the topic has been worn paper thin and yet they’re still trying to dance across it, just to stay together for one second longer. But Shane is just watching him over the flicker of the fire, his mouth a solid line across the bottom half of his face.

Finally, Shane says, “are you recording?”

“No,” says Ryan, taken aback.

“Oh, okay. I didn’t know if you’d turned the camera on or not.”

“I’d tell you if we were filming, dude.”

“It just felt like you were getting into one of our unsolved conversations, you know. The stuff we put on for the show.”

“Do you want me to start filming?”

“No.”

“Well, then, what are you saying, that we’re—that me joking around with you about ghosts and shit is just unsolved dialogue to you? Only things you want to talk about if we’re filming?”

“Save the good stuff for camera, right?”

Ryan realizes he’s still holding one of the metal poles for roasting marshmallows, even though he hasn’t eaten one for twenty minutes now, the sugar gone stale in his mouth. He tosses the pole down beside him, unspeakably frustrated.

“What’s going on here, dude?” he asks. “Did I—did I miss something? Is your ankle really hurting again, do you need more painkillers?”

Shane makes a sound that’s just the wrong shape to be a laugh.

“You’re so concerned with that,” he says quietly. “No, I don’t need more painkillers, I just—I don’t know, Ryan, the whole day—well, before I twisted my ankle at least—I feel like I’ve been trying to just…hang out with you, and you’ve been weird.”

“You’re the one who kept bringing up all the people that died in this canyon, talking about the episode!”

“‘Cause that’s what I thought you wanted to talk about!”

“Well, it’s not!”

“Then what is it? Do you want to just hang out or do you want to film shit? You shoved a camera in my face right after I nearly broke my fucking ankle!”

“Because I didn’t know what to do!”

Ryan’s yelling now, doesn’t know how to stop it.

“You fell off a fucking cliff, Shane! You just—disappeared right in front of me, and I didn’t know whether you’d died or not, and maybe you would’ve if I wasn’t here, so if I’m a little weird right now, it’s—”

He loses steam all of a sudden, because Shane’s eyes have gone so wide they’re lighthouse bright, and it’s fucking clear how stupid Ryan’s being right now. “It’s kind of your fault, okay,” he finishes quietly.

In the silence that follows, he stares into the flames, not daring to look up. He feels terribly exposed all of a sudden, and wishes desperately that he could have his shirt back to hide, as if all of his secrets are written on his skin itself.

“You were being weird before that,” Shane says. Hs voice sounds rougher suddenly.

“I haven’t been sleeping well lately.”

“Have you been having those dreams again?”

Right, because Ryan had been stupid enough to tell Shane about the dreams, back when he thought talking about it in the daytime would turn it into something funny, would take away the threat of them.

He nods.

“Well, I didn’t fall off a cliff, okay? It was just—I’m—I’m right as rain. When we get back, you can tell everyone you saved me.”

“Carried you uphill both ways,” Ryan mutters.

“In the pouring rain.”

“In the pouring rain.”

“Across the whole canyon.”

“Beat off some coyotes who really wanted your gamey meat.”

Shane laughs, and Ryan tries not to stare; he’s been trying so hard not to stare this whole time. If Shane is a geographical landscape of his own, he’s got to be a canyon—deeper than Ryan will ever fully understand, and so challenging Ryan still can’t help but want to climb into him.

“I don’t mean to,” he says softly.

“What?” says Shane.

Ryan’s impressions are off, but he tries the voices anyway. “It’s what Sam says, right? Gandalf’s like, “Don’t you lose him,” and Sam says—he says, “I don’t mean to,” right?”

A smile grows on Shane’s face, small and pleased, like he can’t quite help it. Ryan knows the feeling.

“Right,” Shane says. “Nerd.”

****

They put out the fire and head to sleep early. Ryan was right—the tent is way too small, but with the memory of coyotes fresh in their minds, neither of them pitches the idea of sleeping out in the blue. It’s gotten colder too, a brisk wind cutting through the canyon with a slight whistling sound.

Ryan helps Shane settle down first, moving his ankle carefully so it doesn’t get jostled, and propping it up on the deflated shape of one of the mostly-empty bags. When Ryan gets squirrelly about the idea of the two of them both sleeping shirtless—not that he says it like that, just mutters something about being cold—Shane tells him to put on his shirt.

It fits in the shoulders easily enough, but hangs a little long on Ryan.

“Looking good,” Shane says lazily, and Ryan tells him he’s an idiot so he can hide the way those words make his whole body flush inexplicably.

Lying shoulder to shoulder next to Shane on their sleeping bags, both unzipped all the way open to let in the air, Ryan is almost positive he’s not going to get any sleep. He’s been trying so hard not to think about it, but he’s understood what this feeling means ever since Shane disappeared over the side of the cliff, and he doesn’t want to have to face it now that there’s no immediate action or conversation to distract him, nothing but Shane pressing warm against him.

But when Shane drops off into sleep seemingly within minutes, it’s like he’s leading the way like he was earlier in the day—all Ryan can do is follow.

****

He’s in the office, but he’s sitting at Shane’s desk, and his computer is purple for some reason.

“Shane,” someone says, and Ryan looks up. Oh, he realizes suddenly. He’s in Shane’s body for some reason, and a coworker he doesn’t recognize, but he feels like he knows somehow, is asking him about a video.

The coworker grows horns during the conversation, and raises her hands high above her head to strike. Ryan—Shane!Ryan—is paralyzed. He sees his own body running towards them.

“Ryan!” yells the Ryan body, and he knows it’s Shane in there, and suddenly everything blurs and he’s in his own body again, watching their demon coworker grab Shane around the neck—except no, Shane has morphed into Ryan’s father, gasping as claws sink into his skin.

Ryan doesn’t have time to scream, because he’s somewhere else suddenly. He and Shane are at Ryan’s parents’ house, watching miniature versions of their brothers play tag, running around and around in the back garden. Everything is vaguely pink and comfortable, and Shane is so warm where he’s leaning into Ryan.

Ryan is indescribably happy, in a simple, question-less way.

This seems to go on for some time.

When it dissolves, Ryan resurfaces in the canyon again. He’s alone in the forest—except no, he’s not, Shane is sprawled in a dead weight across his back. Ryan’s staring at a figure hovering two steps beyond where the rock ledge ends past the tree line. A figure in a black, hooded cape suspended in the air. Ryan blinks, and there’s a whole host of ghostly forms popping up behind the caped one, people he knows instinctively are from the plane crash—snapped necks and scrapes and stones embedded into sunken ribcages and all.

A shift in the landscape, and Shane’s gone from his back to standing on the cliff’s edge, facing towards the apparition. It’s nighttime now, but Shane is still perfectly clear in his vision, turning back towards Ryan when he yells for him.

“Shane!”

And Shane turns and his feet slip on the stone.

Rewind.

“Shane!”

Shane turns and his foot falls backwards into open air.

Rewind.

“Shane!”

He turns and the hotel’s ghost draws him back into his arms, except Shane falls straight through him, out of sight.

Rewind.

Shane’s falling.

Rewind.

Shane’s falling.

Rewind—

****

Ryan wakes up.

He comes back to his body piece by piece. His breath hurts in his chest, and his eyes feel heavy, like they’re sinking deeper into his skull with every second. He knows they’re open, but the static blue in front of him takes its time turning into the roof of the tent.

Ryan sits up, his skin peeling slowly away from Shane’s arm, and his head brushes that roof, sending a shudder through the whole structure. He freezes, but Shane doesn’t wake beside him—when Ryan looks down, Shane is as still and calm as Ryan has ever seen him, his face open like earlier that day, except there’s no pain there. He looks like he’s never been in pain in his life, never fallen into open air, and it’s all Ryan could hope for him to look like.

A wave of stiff, incomprehensible emotion rises in him, so thick it registers only as a heaviness in the back of his throat. He doesn’t want to feel like this, but he’s here, in it anyway. He sinks back down slowly onto his sleeping bag, propped up on one elbow so he can still look at Shane, make sure he’s really here, really him.

The man beside him looks like Shane, down to the uneven stubble on his face that grows in first before his beard evens out. He looks like Shane, but bluer, softer.

This could be a dream too.

Ryan feels like he must be in a dream. He looks down, and his hand has moved, hovering over Shane’s side. When Shane breathes in, his side pushes out towards Ryan’s palm, like it’s searching for the contact.

Ryan’s middle finger touches down against the bump of a rib. Two more fingers follow, then a fourth, then his thumb, sunk deep in the shallows in between Shane’s ribs, and Ryan’s hand is sliding up across Shane’s bare skin until his pinkie touches just the edge of his navel.

Shane’s breath moves to the shape of Ryan’s hand.

It’s like a revelation, like he’s a child learning the feel of something he’d thought only imaginary until that moment, and that heavy feeling is spreading from his mouth to shake in his limbs like he’s touched something electric and the current is escaping through him, but all at once he remembers that he’s a man, not a child, and has no permission to touch like this while Shane is asleep, dream or no, and he’s terrified and he’s lifting his hand away—

And Shane’s hand comes up between them and wraps slowly around Ryan’s wrist.

The current goes wild in Ryan’s bloodstream; he goes very still. It’s bluer than ever before in the tent, cupped around the two of them. Shane’s eyes are still closed, but his hand pulls Ryan’s back down onto his skin, and he exhales long and slow when they’re touching again.

Ryan can hear himself make the same sound.

He’s the one falling now, because he can’t seem to keep himself up one second longer. His forehead hits Shane’s collar—shockingly warm—and scrapes up until the top of his head hits the underside of Shane’s jaw. He’s curled over him, gasping against the secret skin at the base of Shane’s neck, where he’s never, ever touched until now. Shane’s fingers tighten around his wrist, one by one, a flex of movement that has Ryan pushing him down harder into the sleeping bag, wanting all at once in a selfish, childish way to flatten him the way he’d pictured Shane flattening him earlier, when Ryan was carrying him.

It’s Shane who is holding all the weight now, with Ryan above him.

Shane takes a deep breath, like he’s going to say something, and Ryan can’t stand the thought of a sound piercing the indigo veil around them—he pushes up on his elbow and carefully lays his mouth over Shane’s, stopping the words before they can escape.

Things become very slow for a moment.

Shane’s mouth is soft as shadows under Ryan’s. His lips draw together slowly and open again, and when they do, Ryan’s bottom lip somehow slips in between, snagging on a sliver of cool wetness where Shane’s lips give way to teeth. A quiet sound vibrates up through Shane’s mouth into Ryan’s, and he has to open his own mouth to answer it, falling somehow even closer; he delivers his own sound into Shane with his tongue as messenger, to make sure it gets through. Shane squeezes his wrist so hard Ryan can almost feel bones meeting other bones for the first time, and then Shane’s trapping his tongue in his mouth, sucking it hard.

Ryan goes dizzy and pulls away for a breath. His eyes have come open, accidental, and Shane’s looking at him, too close for any expression to be read and comprehended. Ryan closes his eyes again and finds Shane’s mouth in the darkness blindly. It’s still open slightly, waiting for him, and this time they’re falling into each other together, tongues meeting to rub rough and uncontrolled and wonderful.

Ryan’s discovering his own river, his own canyon, his own mountain to climb. He’s going to leave his name here, so anyone who explores this landscape afterwards will know.

He’s kissing Shane. This is kissing, they’re kissing, Shane isn’t out of reach, he’s under Ryan’s hands, he’s kissing him back.

Ryan breaks away again.

“Am I asleep?”

“No,” Shane breathes. “You’re here with me.”

“That doesn’t mean I’m not asleep.”

Shane’s free hand winds up into Ryan’s hair and pulls him back down. When their mouths come back together, Shane’s smile makes their teeth bump sharply, sudden and sweet.

“You’re awake,” Shane says simply. “I die in your dreams, don’t I?”

Ryan nods.

“Then kiss me again, Bergara,” Shane tells him. “See if it kills me.”

So Ryan does. Again, and again, and again.

Shane stays whole and safe and alive under him.

He’s with him; they’re falling at the same time.

****

In the morning, the sun turns their tent golden in slices, creeping up Shane’s body first and then onto Ryan’s face. He wakes slowly this time, and gets to realize again and again in hazy, sleep-warm moments that his mouth is touching Shane’s shoulder and that it’s okay that it’s there.

Shane sits sleepily in the entrance of the tent, his foot carefully moved by Ryan onto a rock instead of their bags so that Ryan can pack up. He doesn’t move until Ryan drifts too close, and then he snags Ryan’s wrist again, the way he did in the middle of the night, just as certain and dream-like.

They stand there like that for a long moment. Shane turns Ryan’s hand over in his, and then presses his mouth to Ryan’s wrist, too slack to be a kiss, and too purposeful to be anything else.

“I thought I was being too obvious when I said you should wear my shirt,” Shane says.

“Maybe a bit. But only looking back now.”

“You going to carry me all the way home?” Shane asks.

“All the way up Mount Doom.”

“We didn’t find you any ghosts.”

Ryan still hasn’t said all the things on his list of things he needs to say to Shane. Things like, “I think I dream about you dying so often because you’re something I can’t stand to lose.”

But he has time to say those things. Time still to cross that canyon.

“It’s okay,” Ryan says. “This is more than enough.”

And they waste the rest of the morning rolling around together on the flattened tent in the summer sunlight before Ryan gets Shane on his back again and carries him home, easy as anything.

Easy as a dream.

**Author's Note:**

> why do I love writing people being so shocked that ~kissing is ACTUALLY occurring, it's just the best. 
> 
> I don't have a bfu tumblr but I hear that's the Fandom Place so feel free to share this fic on there for me if you liked it! (never share my shit on twitter. for the love of god, no. that's a site Real People use, with their Real Names and everything, including our ghoulboys. on that Note..........sara has tumblr, so if you post my fic there and tag her (or the main bfu tag tbh, or shane and ryan's names), I legally get to murder you)
> 
> btw Ryan in this fic thinks "invalid" is only for people who are sick, but Shane actually uses it correctly, it's also for people who injured too
> 
> also, if you know Anything about medical stuff and ur like "um...shane passing out twice is Definitely Bad and not normal and are we sure he doesn't have a concussion??".....ur probably right, but I love drama?
> 
> some After Fic Content: 
> 
> Shane's sprain was actually a fucking fracture, which messed with some later shoots and made for a shitty return home flight, but they did end up using some of the Grand Canyon footage in the last five minutes of the episode when Ryan and the editors put it together, bits of b-roll in the canyon under Ryan's voiceover being like "we tried plunging into the depths of the canyon to discover any ghosts left behind by *insert details of the plane crashes here* but we hadn't even gotten close to the site when we ran into trouble of a different sort" / cut to that footage of Shane being like "yeah I just fell off a cliff and sprained my ankle, sorry" and then Ryan voiceovers some more over footage of him putting up the tent that Shane filmed and then footage he took the next morning to show how pretty the canyon was. They even set up a tripod at the end of one trail right as they get off the trail, and then get a short footage of Ryan carrying Shane because Shane thinks they can't leave that bit out of the episode (it's the next morning. Shane's got his own shirt back on, but Ryan's still shirtless. "It's what the viewers want," Shane says). The episode ends with a short clip filmed by Shane in the hospital, of Ryan sitting in a chair in the waiting room when Shane got out, absolutely dead asleep. 
> 
> "This is what happens if you have to carry Shane "The Mountain" Madej," Shane's voice can be heard saying. Ryan starts to wake up. It's intensely cute. He murmurs Shane's name in the Softest voice and Shane replies in the Gentlest voice, and then the footage cuts out, and it goes back to creepy unsolved music and Ryan's voiceover being like "is the El Tovar Hotel really haunted by the shadows of its past? Did Shane get pushed off a cliff by a ghost, or is he just clumsy? Our experiences here show there's definitely something not right about this area so many tourists are drawn to, but whether or not ghosts still linger in this canyon will remain...unsolved"
> 
> lol 
> 
> thank you for reading!


End file.
